When Feed the Future shut down, these researchers built something new

Field plots in Ghana and across West Africa were already planted and beginning to mature — indigenous vegetables such as okra and African tamarind fruit taking root in carefully mapped trial sites. Researchers were tracking how local varieties performed across agroecological zones, comparing yields, resilience, and market potential. After years of groundwork, the data was finally starting to come in. Then last year’s stop-work order on U.S. foreign aid spending arrived. Overnight, work on the projects was halted. The initiative was part of Feed the Future, an interagency effort led by the U.S. Agency for International Development with a budget of roughly $1 billion per year. Launched after the 2008 global food price crisis, the program was built on a simple premise: Strengthen agricultural systems in advance — through research, innovation, and long-term investment — and countries would be better positioned to withstand future shocks. A central pillar of that effort was a network of 17 Feed the Future innovation labs housed at U.S. universities and linked to research partners around the world. Some labs focused on developing drought-tolerant wheat and improving resistance to crop diseases. Others worked on reducing post-harvest losses or strengthening livestock productivity. Together, they represented one of the largest sustained U.S. investments in agricultural research for development. Among them was the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Horticulture — focused on fruits and vegetables, from how they are grown and bred to how they are stored, marketed, and consumed — led by Erin McGuire at the University of California, Davis. By the time the USAID shutdown came, the horticulture lab had roughly 15 projects underway across Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Nepal, Kenya, and elsewhere. “We were just starting to see results come in, crops in the field, data ready to be collected, and then everything shut down … just millions of dollars wasted,” McGuire said. Rather than walk away, she and several former colleagues began sketching out an alternative. Within weeks, they incorporated a new public benefit company called Responsible Innovations. The goal was not to recreate the horticulture lab, but to preserve its research partnerships and keep collaborative projects alive under a different institutional roof. Innovating responsibly At the core of Responsible Innovations is a specific view of what makes food systems innovation — and scaling — “responsible.” That means new solutions should be ethically sound, environmentally sustainable, and socially beneficial, with careful attention to unintended consequences and power dynamics, including who defines problems and who benefits from proposed solutions. That lens also shapes how its agricultural innovations are scaled, McGuire said, reflecting the belief that growth is not inherently neutral — and that without deliberate safeguards, new technologies and approaches often benefit those with more resources first, reinforcing rather than reducing inequality. Responsible Innovations follows a similar path to other recent spinouts by former USAID staffers — including the newly launched DIV Fund, an independent nonprofit which is reviving USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures, a program that backed early-stage, evidence-driven development innovations. Meanwhile, there are signs the door for Feed the Future may not be fully closed. The $50 billion foreign affairs spending bill that the U.S. Congress recently passed includes $175 million for international agricultural research, including at least $72 million for the innovation labs. For comparison, the Horticulture Innovation Lab’s most recent award was a five-year, $15 million grant, with a total funding potential of up to $34.5 million. All but one of the 17 Feed the Future innovation labs received stop-work orders from the Trump administration last year, and most were forced to drastically scale down their work and lay off staff. Agricultural research on farms and laboratories carrying out Feed the Future projects across the world was interrupted and lost. And there are looming questions around what exactly the allotted $72 million would be able to restart, whether the funds would actually be disbursed, and when it all would happen. From lab to network Responsible Innovations began taking shape even before the innovation labs were formally shut down. Immediately after U.S. President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20 last year, his administration ordered a temporary pause on foreign aid, pending a review of whether programs aligned with its “America First” priorities. Days later it issued a directive requiring federal agencies to halt all diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility initiatives, including those tied to USAID-funded work. When McGuire received notice of the directive, she began thinking about how to find a new institutional home for work she saw as central to the Horticulture Innovation Lab’s mission — particularly efforts related to locally led agricultural research and gender equity. That included GenderUp, a discussion-based tool developed with the research network CGIAR and Wageningen University in the Netherlands to support more inclusive approaches to scaling agricultural innovations. Over time, McGuire said, the innovation lab had shifted toward a locally led research model, with projects directed by scientists based in the countries where the work was taking place. McGuire and her colleagues felt the lab’s equity-focused work was unlikely to survive even a short-term review. Most of the lab’s staff were laid off last April. On May 8, McGuire received formal notice that the lab’s USAID award had been terminated. The work, however, did not entirely come to a halt. On April 14, 2025 — weeks before the termination letter arrived — McGuire and her colleagues formally established Responsible Innovations, creating an institutional home for GenderUp and other equity-focused efforts. The new venture also gave the team space to move beyond a crop-by-crop approach. “The agriculture research for development space is moving towards food systems because that’s much more effective,” McGuire said. Today, Responsible Innovations has five full-time staff, additional team members who join depending on the project, and a global network of roughly 50 experts across disciplines, with plans to expand. Its work is funded entirely through contracts with multilateral organizations, NGOs, and private-sector partners. For McGuire, who leads the research remains central to the model. Under the Horticulture Innovation Lab, she said the team deliberately moved away from a structure in which U.S. institutions set priorities and researchers elsewhere followed — which she believes led to stronger research and more durable solutions. Responsible Innovations is now trying to carry forward that approach. The case for fruits and vegetables One reason McGuire was so reluctant to let the Horticulture Innovation Lab disappear is that it represents a corner of agricultural research that has long been underfunded. “Ninety-three percent of food-based dietary guidelines show that half your plate should be fruits and vegetables,” McGuire said. “Yet only about 10% of research dollars goes into fruits and vegetables.” That mismatch, she argued, has real consequences for nutrition, food systems, and resilience — especially in lower-income countries where fruits and vegetables are often central to diets but poorly supported by research and seed systems. “When it comes to breeding, attention is given to other crops than vegetables,” said Freda Asem, an agricultural economist and senior lecturer in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness at the University of Ghana. Asem served as the West Africa regional hub coordinator for the Horticulture Innovation Lab and oversaw the field plots of okra and tamarind that were forced to be abandoned last year. “If you look at the number of breeders who are experts in vegetables compared to other crops, the number is really, really low,” she said. That imbalance, researchers said, reflects a broader policy bias toward staple crops, alongside fragmented value chains and weak infrastructure that make fruits and vegetables riskier and harder to scale. That was why joining a Feed the Future-supported horticulture project in 2022 felt like a rare opening for Asem’s research. Through the West Africa hub, Asem and her colleagues began work that would have been difficult to mount otherwise: A regionwide effort focused on indigenous fruits and vegetables. The project combined mapping exercises, farmer and consumer surveys, and field trials that compared the growth performance of local and improved crop varieties. This work required time, coordination, and resources that are often out of reach for horticulture researchers. “When the stop order came, everything that was in the field had to be left in the field,” Asem said. “Plants and crops were literally abandoned.” “To just cut the ones that are already ongoing, especially ones that are already in the field, for me, I think that was more of a waste of money than saving money,” she added. After the shutdown, she joined Responsible Innovations’ expert network — one of dozens of researchers McGuire now works with across regions and disciplines, many of whom were previously connected through the Feed the Future innovation labs. For McGuire, the emphasis has been on keeping those connections intact and finding ways for researchers to continue working together, even as the institutions that once supported them have fallen away. “We’re creating a platform for experts that might otherwise be geographically siloed to work together and submit proposals together,” she said. “The idea is that we are stronger together.”